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Caelum Et
Terra Conference Section:
The Social
Order As Community
This article was originally
published in Caelum Et Terra, Fall 1996,
volume 6 no 3, and is used here with the author’s permission.
To obtain permission to republish
this article, contact the author by clicking on the link above.
I. Introduction
There
has long been a persistent desire on the part of mankind to imagine or to
construct a paradise on earth, a utopia in which all of his problems and
conflicts would vanish or at least diminish.
Most people have heard of some of the 19th century American examples,
such as Brook Farm in Massachusetts or New Harmony, Indiana, but there have
been many before and since. Those who
know Ronald Knox's book, Enthusiasm, will remember that numerous
heretical sects made attempts to construct such a Kingdom of God on earth
throughout the centuries. And while it
is certainly true that such utopians and visionaries have always existed, it
seems to me that there is a special reason why today, and indeed for the last
century of so, longings for an ideal community are more apt to arise in
people's hearts than previously.
Let
me quote from an article in the July 29th 1995, America. This is a description of a 60s-style
gathering called the Rainbow Family that has taken place every year since 1972,
and last year was held near Taos, New Mexico.
On
the first day of the gathering, I watched dozens of young
people pound drums and hundreds more
dance in half-naked or fully
naked abandon.
The writer interviewed one regular attender of
these gatherings as to their aim.
Robbie
told me that the Rainbow Family "is about the conscious
and
positive evolution of humankind. It's
about world peace and
healing
our poor, damaged Mother Earth. It's
about making us
into better people. It happens like a miracle - it's just love,
all these wounded, strange, crazy
people learning how to love one
another." Jesus, he said, would feel at home at the
gathering.
When
I asked Robbie what he wanted the human race to evolve into, he responded:
The
ideal is what the Lakota Nation, the Cherokee
Nation, the Taos Nation and other
Indian nations have. That kind
of unity with diversity. The ability to know who you are in a
society
and on the earth. Knowing that you are
related to every
human
being you may come across." Loving
and sharing, he said,
are
at the heart of so-called "primitive" societies.
It is easy to see through the pretensions of the
Rainbow Family. To imagine that a real
human community can be created by a week of dancing in a field, and that
people's deep defects and faults can be eliminated so easily is to ignore the
fact of original sin and has always been the hallmark of such utopians. I think that if the members of the Rainbow
Family ever had to sit down and make some hard decisions of the sort that every
community eventually has to make they would soon be disabused of their notion
that feelings of peace and harmony are a substitute for clear thinking and
hard-won moral virtues.
But
nevertheless I would not mock such a gathering, for I think that it is a
witness to the very deep and laudable desire on the part of human beings for
community. And I would suggest that
there is something specially wrong with the modern world that makes it probable
that our desire for community will be more intense and at the same time more unsatisfied,
than has been the case in other ages or in parts of the world less affected by
modernity.
II. The
founders of modernity
What
specifically is it about the modern world that would aggravate such desires for
community? It is this: The modern Western world is built on
principles which deny or reject the possibility or desirability of community as
the foundation for social life. The men
of the 18th century who more or less created the modern social order did so in
conscious rejection of the social community that had been built, imperfectly it
is true, by Catholic civilization over many centuries. They consciously rejected so much of our
heritage as Catholics that as a result the public order of the modern West is
based on principles much more anti-Catholic than most of us recognize. Specifically they willed to create a social
order not based on mankind viewed as a brotherhood, but on other and less
communitarian principles. They aimed to
create what some of them candidly termed a "commercial
republic." Before examining in
more detail what they actually said or did, let us look at this phrase,
"commercial republic."
In
itself there is nothing wrong with commerce.
Though it obviously should be subordinate to the more primary economic
acts of producing and consuming, there is certainly a need for buying, selling,
trading, even importing and exporting.
But would we want to define our commonwealth, our nation, by its
commercial activity? Economic activity itself is a subordinate activity of man,
and within economic activity, commerce properly so-called, is still more
subordinate. Why then would anyone want
to raise it to the pinnacle and put it on the masthead of his civilization?
The
answer to this lies in the abandonment by the men of the 18th century of an
attempt to found civilization upon a religious or metaphysical principle. In part because of a century or more of
unfortunate religious strife, but still more, I think, because of new
philosophies that either mocked or ignored Europe's traditional religious
sense, many thinkers turned to something as ancillary as commerce to find the
basis for their new order of things. I
hope to show that during the eighteenth century a new concept of civilization
and the social order became widespread in Europe and her colonies, and that we
are still living with that concept today.
The
men of the 18th century whom I will be quoting and to whom I will be referring
intended to create a new basis for society.
And in their thinking we can see with what force they turned against all
that the Church had hitherto created in European culture. I will be quoting from their writings, as
well as from some modern commentators who happen to be in agreement with
them. In the first place I will be
making use of material, gathered from an essay by one Ralph Lerner, who has
written for a volume published by the American Enterprise Institute.[i] The interesting thing here is that Lerner,
although he sees the same doctrines that I do in these 18th century writers,
views them as the prophets of a great new age for mankind, while I consider
them as having helped to destroy whatever was left of Christian civilization
and community. So, insofar as part of
my evidence has been selected for me, it has been selected by an opponent of my
position. Perhaps this will make it
more objective. At any rate, it is
representative of its age and will, I think, serve to show what the real
foundations of today's social order are.
First
of all, then, what 18th century thinkers are we talking about? I will be speaking of a group of writers,
primarily John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, David Hume, and our own Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush.
All these are representatives of the so-called Enlightenment, whether of
England, France, Scotland or the English colonies in North America. For all the differences in their thought,
Lerner calls them "a band of brethren in arms," (LSNS, 25) for they
all worked to overthrow the West's remaining heritage of Christian civilization
and substitute something new. To begin,
Lerner says that these innovators
saw
in commercial republicanism a more sensible and realizable
alternative
to earlier notions of civic virtue and a more just
alternative
to the theological-political regime that had so long
ruled Europe and its colonial
periphery. (LSLN, 24)
These men had a profound desire to overturn
traditional European social life. They
were impatient with "constraints and preoccupations based on visions of
perfection beyond the reach of all or most." (LSLN, 25) "They saw fit, rather, to promote a new
ordering of political, economic, and social life." (LSLN, 25). What was the old order which they wished to
replace? "The old order was preoccupied
with intangible goods to an extent we now hardly ever see. The king had his glory, the nobles their
honor, the Christians their salvation...." (LSLN,26) But,
"Eighteenth-century men had to be brought to see how fanciful those
noncommercial notions were."
(LSLN, 26)
David
Hume, for example, found it quite understandable that men would fight over
their economic self-interest, but he found it utterly inexplicable that they
should ever have any
controversy
about an article of faith, which is utterly absurd
and
unintelligible, is not a difference in sentiment, but in a
few phrases and expressions, which
one party accepts of without
understanding
them, and the other refuses in the same manner.
(Hume - LSLN, 28)
Hume believed that Christianity had nourished a
spirit of persecution "more furious and enraged than the most cruel
factions that ever arose from interest and ambition." (Hume - LSLN,
28) So that, as Lerner says,
"fanaticism prompted by principle was incompatible with civility, reason,
and government." (LSLN, 28) And also,
...where
the ancient polity, Christianity, and the feudal
aristocracy, each in its own fashion,
sought to conceal, deny, or
thwart
most of the common passions for private gratification and
physical comfort, the commercial
republic built on those
passions. (LSLN, 30)
In
seeking satisfaction under the new dispensation a man needed
to
be at once warm and cool, impassioned and calculating, driven
yet
sober. Eschewing brilliance and
grandeur, the new-model man
of
prudence followed a way of life designed to secure for himself
a
small but continual profit. (LSLN, 30)
Lerner continues, "The contrast with and
opposition to the Christian and Greek world could hardly have been
greater." (LSLN,33)
One
can also see this in John Locke. In his
(first) Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke bases his argument for civic
toleration of all religions on the following supposition:
The
commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted
only
for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil
interests.
Civil
interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of
body;
and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands,
houses,
furniture, and the like. (LCT, 3)
He reiterates this point in his Second Essay
Concerning Civil Government:
The
great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into
commonwealths, and putting themselves
under government, is the
preservation of their property; to
which in the state of Nature
there are many things wanting. (CCG,
53)
Rulers are not to be involved in matters beyond
these "civil interests," and the general tenor of Locke's argument is
that religion is a purely private matter which does not even affect men's moral
conduct. As Locke says,
If
a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to
be
punished as a pernicious citizen. The
power of the magistrate
and
the estates of the people may be equally secure whether any
man
believe these things or no. I readily
grant that these
opinions
are false and absurd. But the business
of laws is not
to
provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and
security
of the commonwealth and of every particular man's goods
and person. (LCT, 15)
The point here is not that we should pine for the
restoration of the Inquisition. Simply
that when men unite to form political communities, it is a fatal mistake to
assume that things such as God or human morality are of no concern to the
community, as such. St. Thomas, for
example wrote that law was concerned "to lead men to virtue," though
not in a tyrannical manner. But for
Locke and the other thinkers of this movement, law is concerned only with the
protection of property - and liberty.
This one only intangible good, liberty, that the men promoting the new
social order valued as a public good will turn up again as we view the results
of their work.
What
is the result of narrowing the basis of the social order to material
things? Montesquieu wrote,
We
see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit
of
commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral
virtues;
the most trifling things, those which humanity would
demand, are there done, or there
given, only for money. (The
Spirit of the Laws, 146)
And Lerner sums up Montesquieu's thought as
follows,
For
Montesquieu, a regime dedicated to commerce partook less of a
union of fellow citizens, bound
together by ties of friendship,
than of an alliance of contracting
parties, intent on maximizing
their freedom of choice through a
confederation of convenience.
It was in this character of an
alliance that men found themselves
cut
off from one another or, rather, linked to one another
principally through a market
mechanism. It was a world in which
everything had its price - and,
accordingly, its sellers and
buyers. Not surprisingly, the habits of close
calculation and
"exact
justice" appropriate to one kind of activity were extended
to
all kinds, and political community was replaced by a
marketplace of arm's-length
transactions. (LSLN, 44)
We can see in these statements, admittedly with
differing emphases depending on which 18th-century writer is being quoted or
referred to, an utterly this-worldy notion of life with two chief aspects: first, a rejection of what Lerner calls
"intangible" goods; in Hume, for example, an utter disdain for the notion
that it could ever be reasonable to disagree over a mere article of faith, a
metaphysical abstraction, "which one party accepts of without
understanding them, and the other refuses in the same manner," (Hume -
LSLN,28), and finally, in Locke, an explicit restricting of religion to the
private sphere. Religion has no
importance for the public life of a nation or culture.
This
is in fact the key point: No culture
exists or can exist without a set of ruling ideas. When everything that smacks of the transcendent is eliminated
from the public life of a culture, something has to take its place. In our case it is largely commerce and the
ideals and ideas that commerce fosters.
Moreover, the liberty that accompanies such a commercial society is a
liberty whose chief effect is the dissolving of traditional ties and the
destruction of traditional communities, whether that takes place because of
direct attacks on the family and on chastity or indirectly, because of an
economic system that works as a solvent in hundreds of ways, driving mothers
out of the home, moving families about to seek employment or emptying rural
areas of farm families.
It
is important for us to see how this rejection of any but a materialistic basis
for society plays out in everyday life.
One example, taken from a writer of the 18th century is the
following. Benjamin Rush, a signer of
our Declaration of Independence, wrote an essay entitled, "Observations
Upon the Study of the Greek and Latin Languages," in which he wrote,
We
occupy a new country. Our principal
business should be to
explore
and apply its resources, all of which press us to
enterprise and haste. Under these circumstances, to spend four
or
five years in learning two dead languages, is to turn our
backs upon a gold mine, in order to
amuse ourselves in catching
butterflies. (Rush - LSLN, 45)
Once one rejects "intangible" goods, it
is only the cash calculus that counts.
Latin and Greek will not open trade routes or help in land speculation,
therefore they must go.
The
more recent heirs to the same tradition of a commercial society exhibit the
same attitude toward tangible and intangible goods. Consider the following passage from John Kenneth Galbraith's 1958
book, The Affluent Society.
In
the autumn of 1954, during the Congressional elections of that
year,
the Republicans replied to Democratic attacks on their
stewardship
by arguing that this was the second best year in
history. It was not, in all respects, a happy
defense. Many
promptly
said that second best was not good enough - certainly
not
for Americans. But no person in either
party showed the
slightest disposition to challenge
the standard by which it is
decided
that one year is better than another.
Nor was it felt
that
any explanation was required. No one
would be so eccentric
as
to suppose that second best meant second best in the progress
of
the arts and the sciences. No one would
assume that it
referred
to health, education, or the battle against juvenile
delinquency. There was no suggestion that a better or
poorer
year was one in which the chances for
survival amidst the
radioactive
furniture of the world had increased or diminished.
Despite a marked and somewhat
ostensible preoccupation with
religious
observances at the time, no one was moved to suppose
that
1954 was the second best year as measured by the number of
people
who had found enduring spiritual solace.
Second
best could mean only one thing - that the production of
goods was the second highest in history. There had been a year
in
which production was higher and hence was better. In fact in
1954 the Gross National Product was
$360.5 billion; the year
before
it had been $364.5. This measure of
achievement was
acceptable
to all. It is a relief on occasion to
find a
conclusion
that is above faction, indeed above debate.
On the
importance of production there is no
difference between
Republicans
and Democrats, right and left, white or colored,
Catholic or Protestant. (TAS, 101)
Doubtless there were a few Americans in both 1954
who rejected the notion that we ought to measure our welfare by purely
materialistic measures - but whatever they may have thought, public
discourse in this country is conducted solely in terms of material goods.
More
recently the very respectable free-market oriented weekly magazine, The
Economist, published in London, continued this same tradition of putting
tangible goods above everything else.
In an editorial in the September 9, 1995 issue, on "The
Disappearing Family," the editors opined:
Anxiety
about the state of the family is nothing new.
A constant
of
modern history is the perception of social decay: the
"breakdown of the family"
has seen long and distinguished
service. Another constant is the fact of material
progress. The
association between the two is
unsurprising. Economic progress
gives
people opportunities they were hitherto denied, which
provokes social change. And social change almost always seems to
be
regarded initially as for the worse.
In
thinking about the family today, it is well to keep that
history
in mind. Over the past 30 years almost
all rich
countries have seen big increases in
the rate of divorce.
Expanding opportunity is doubtless one
of many causes. More
women have a career and the financial
independence that goes with
it: far fewer are forced to choose between
misery in a failed
marriage
and destitution. And divorce laws have
been greatly
eased, reflecting demands for greater
freedom from the control
once exercised over private behaviour
by church and state. If
divorce has gone up for reasons such
as these, the change must be
counted, at least in the first
instance, as a gain.
And a bit later it goes on to say:
Simply,
it is too soon to say of society at large that the rise
in divorce, and the increase in
single-parent households
associated with it, has gone so far
that the loss outweighs the
gain. Without compelling evidence that the net harm is great,
and
perhaps not even then, governments have no business imposing
their moral choices on citizens. This remains true even if it is
mainly
adults who benefit from more divorce and mainly children
who
lose....
I submit that there is a direct and clear road
from the statements of the 18th century writers I have quoted or referred to
above, and these contemporary attitudes toward tangible and intangible
goods. In the Galbraith quote and in
the editorial from The Economist we see the consequences of a rejection
of any intangible goods - except unrestrained freedom, the only intangible
eagerly embraced by the modern world, which is also the only intangible good
mentioned by Locke. "A constant of
modern history is the perception of social decay," The Economist's
editorial writer says. Perhaps that is
because a constant of modern history is the reality of social decay, a
hypothesis that he does not consider.
But note that "material progress" is what makes possible this
increased freedom and social change.
"Economic progress gives people opportunities they were hitherto
denied...." Fewer women "are
forced to choose between misery in a failed marriage and
destitution." I pass over the
well-known fact that divorced women and their children do experience, if not
always destitution, at least a much lower material standard of living, and
simply point out that if "material progress" gives people the
opportunity to simply walk away from difficult relationships instead of doing
the hard work of trying to make them work out, then that is hardly a gain. Of course there are some relationships in
which people cannot reasonably or even safely remain - and in those cases a
Christian civilization should offer all the support, of every sort, that is
necessary. But it is not increased
divorce, or indeed any divorce at all, that is needed here to promote human
welfare.
As
my last examples, I take first a statement by the president of the American
Enterprise Institute, Christopher DeMuth, as quoted in the Washington Post
on February 23 of this year. Mr. DeMuth
said,
It's
certainly true that capitalism sometimes conflicts with
the
preservation of established cultural values.
The gale of
creative
destruction not only destroys old firms, but old methods
of
doing things. Another world for that
gale is progress.
The
old things that are destroyed by capitalism are not just inefficient firms or
industrial methods invented in a prior era.
They include things such as families and communities and even Christian
civilization itself. Nor, as some like
to pretend, is all this the result of some recent bad turn in our history, a
falling off from an earlier and so-called Christian America, a land that never
was. No, it is inherent in the
commercial republic constructed at the end of the 18th century by the Founders
of this country, who consciously and carefully rejected traditional European
civilization in order to attempt to build the Novus Ordo Seclorum, the New
Order of the Ages.
And
finally, I quote from a very recent statement by Associate Justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia. In the
same speech in which he opined that the state should permit abortion if that is
what the electorate wants, Scalia gave his view of the task of government,
which was summed up as "protecting person and property and ensuring the
conditions for prosperity."[ii] This, of course, is nothing but a
restatement of John Locke, and demonstrates the fact that conservatives in
America are simply one variety of Lockean liberals.
Perhaps
the best summation of the commercial republic can be found in the Argentine
writer, Julio Meinvielle, in his book, From Lamennais to Maritain.[iii]
We
might also point out that a society under the banner of Money,
such as the Anglo-American commercial
society, or under the
banner of Work, such as Soviet
Russia, will be structurally
atheistic; for even though the
merchant and the worker may
believe
in God, they do not believe in Him in their capacity as
merchant
or worker but just as private persons; that is, because
they are more than just merchants or
workers. For that very
reason,
a society which exalts Money or Work as the supreme
value of life is necessarily
atheistic as a society.
III.
Critics of capitalism
The
capitalist system has triumphed in the modern world. But not everyone has rejoiced at that triumph. In fact, the critics of capitalism have been
many, and have represented many differing and opposed points of view. Of course socialists and communists have
been against capitalism, but its opponents have also included many very
traditional Catholics, such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, men no one
can accuse of being influenced by what we call the Left. Nor is it surprising that so many have been
able to see that the mere production of material products cannot possibly be
the purpose of the social order or the state and that the social atomism
resulting from making competition and contract the basis for society is
profoundly contrary to the nature of man.
This
widespread opposition to capitalism has been of concern to some of its defenders. For example, Michael Novak, a writer to whom
I will be referring more than once, writes, "Although the evidence of the
immense benefits for...moral progress ushered into history by capitalist
economies lies before their eyes, they [i.e. anticapitalist intellectuals] go
on as if it does not exist."[iv] The defenders of capitalism commonly talk as
if only the left and a few naive fellow travellers, mostly ecclesiastics, were
enemies of the capitalist economic order.
And so they have attempted to explain this opposition, or explain it
away, in various ways. For example, one
free marketer, Ernest van den Haag, explains this opposition as an example of
irrational commitment to ideology:
Union
leaders, socialists, academic egalitarians, Marxists,
totalitarians
and millenarians of every kind have a strong
emotional investment in their
policies and theories which
ultimately
leads to ideological and finally to material
investment. They cannot be persuaded by any argument,
however
well it shows that the policy they
favor is contrary to the
public
interest, ineffective or both. The
attempt of economists
to tutor the emotionally committed is
as doomed to failure as the
attempts
of philosophers to tutor the insane.[v]
And van den Haag goes on to say that
rational
knowledge is of little help in dispelling the resentment
against
the market - or the longing for an ideal system in which
a just government justly rewards
moral merits.
On
closer analysis this longing rests on nonrational fantasies:
Each of us secretly hopes that his
essential superiority will be
recognized
in an ideal system. Albeit
unconsciously,
revolutionaries
as well as reformers place this hope on an ideal
government, which functions as a true
parens patriae, a just and
omniscient parent - just as a gambler
places his hope on Dame
Fortuna, who inexplicably but
certainly and justly will love him
best,
and prefer him - as mother should have done.
(CSOH, 27)
Another writer in the same volume says,
I
suggest that the root of much - perhaps not all, but much – of
the hostility to free markets comes
from man's difficulty in
dealing
with the most human of activities, the making of
conscious choices. (CSOH, 47)
I could continue in this vein, quoting other
writers' accounts as to the true sources of opposition to capitalism. But what I believe to be those true sources
is perhaps apparent in what I have said above:
Human beings have a powerful, though faulty, longing for justice and
brotherhood. Modernity and the economic
system it fosters, capitalism, can never produce either. Therefore the resentment against capitalism
arises.
IV. The
romanticization of capitalism
Now
some defenders of capitalism seem to have seen this. They understand that capitalism must win at other levels besides
the merely materialistic. And so
several efforts have arisen to romanticize capitalism. One such effort can be found in Michael
Novak's book, Toward a Theology of the Corporation.[vi]
In
thinking about the corporation in history and its theological
significance, I begin with a general
theological principle.
George Bernanos once said that grace
is everywhere. Wherever we
look in the world, there are signs of
God's presence: in the
mountains, in a grain of sand, in a
human person, in the poor and
the
hungry. The earth is charged with the
grandeur of God. So
is
human history.
If
we look for signs of grace in the corporation, we may discern
seven of them - a suitably
sacramental number. (TTC, 37)
What are these seven "signs of
grace?" They are: creativity, liberty, birth and mortality,
social motive, social character, insight, and the rise of liberty and election. Novak continues, "In these seven ways,
corporations offer metaphors for grace, a kind of insight into God's ways in
history." (TTC, 43)
Now
in fact most of what Novak says about the theology of the corporation seems to
me simply inflated nonsense. The
interesting thing about it is not his pseudo-theology, but the fact that he
feels the need to offer one at all. It
suggests that he might feel that many of the objections made against capitalism
and its lack of community have merit.
For example, here is his explanation of "social character,"
one of the corporation's "signs of grace."
The
corporation is inherently and in its essence corporate. The
very word suggests communal,
nonindividual, many acting together.
Those who describe capitalism by
stressing the individual
entrepreneur
miss the central point. Buying and
selling by
individual
entrepreneurs occurred in biblical times.
What is
interesting
and novel...is the communal focus of the new ethos:
the rise of communal risk taking, the
pooling of resources, the
sense
of communal religious vocation in economic activism. (TTC,
40-41)
The attempt to harness the desire for community
for the sake of capitalistic business enterprises has had more success than it
deserves. It forces us, however, to
focus on the question of what capitalism really is and what kind of social
order it creates. Is it one of atomism
and strife or, as Novak asserts, is it a communal and corporate one? Pirate crews were also communal and slave
gangs worked corporately. Much more
than verbal similarity is needed to show that capitalism is the communitarian
force that Novak makes of it here.
V. Is
there a "Catholic Whig Tradition?"
Michael
Novak, however, makes another and more serious attempt to put capitalism in a
communitarian and less harsh light. He
writes as follows,
...beginning
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...a
group
of Western European moralists became skeptical of the moral
biases of the aristocratic class and
developed the thesis that a
regime based upon commerce, and
pursuing plenty as well as and
even
more than power, offered the most reasonable route to the
moral betterment of the human race.
(THOL, 63)
And, "Where earlier generations found the
pursuit of plenty, of wealth, and of commerce morally inferior, they found it
morally superior to the foundations of any previous regime." Novak posits and attempts to discover what
he calls a "Catholic Whig tradition," that is, a line of Catholic
thinkers who were more or less in agreement with the 18th-century project of
refounding the social order on a new basis.
Let us see what this supposed Catholic Whig tradition is and whether in
fact there is any such thing.
I will begin by following Novak as he
conducts his search. One cannot
understand Latin American thought, Novak begins, "unless one understands
the Catholic intellectual traditions of southern Europe and Latin
America...." (THOL, 1) So far, so good. He points out that this is true even of Latin American thinkers
who reject the Catholic faith. Let me
quote a fine passage of Novak's,
Moreover,
I have encountered in my travels many writers and
scholars in Latin America who, while
not Catholic, find the
language of northern Anglo-Saxon
political economy too
emotionally and culturally thin, too
materialistic in its timbre,
too
individualistic in its intonation, too dryly pragmatic. For
many
in Latin America, the smell of incense at the High Mass, the
flickering
candles and their smoke, the bells, the sonorous
hymns,
and the taste of the Lord's Body on the tongue convey a
sensibility
that is far thicker than that received in the bare
white
Puritan churches of New England....
A
highly cultured people, furthermore, necessarily carries with
it a profoundly conservative
sensibility. Painfully aware of the
richness and complexity of the past,
they revel in holding onto
that past and recreating it. Partly, they live in memory as
birds in air. Their imaginations need the past as certain
fauna
live only in the tangled jungle; one
sees this vividly in Latin
American
novelists. Thus, nearly all Latin
Americans, even the
most radical, nourish a conservative
consciousness, sometimes
under the banner of "national
identity." They identify
themselves
with past events, heroes, movements, struggles.
Progressives in Latin America are
seldom purely progressive; most
want
to carry their past proudly with them as they advance.
(THOL,
1-2)
I can easily agree with what Novak has written
here. He reveals the existence of an
intellectual tradition that is utterly unknown to most North Americans. With reference to socio-political thought,
this tradition begins in Plato and Aristotle, then continues with Catholic
thinkers including Augustine, Aquinas, Bellarmine, and later on DeMaistre and
Donoso Cortes. It is a tradition that
is worthy of being better known among Anglo-Saxons, especially Anglo-Saxon
Catholics, and in many important respects, it is totally opposed, in both its
starting points and in its conclusions, to our own traditions of political
thought. Novak says as much (in a
different book), with reference to Latin America
a
socialist order is closer to their own past.
It is less
pluralistic and more centralized, and
it allows for a more
intense
union of church and state than does the democratic
pluralism
of the North American type."
(LSLN, 4)
(One can accept this without thereby becoming an
advocate of socialism, for socialism was simply one more and flawed attempt to
construct a community without God. Just
because capitalism is wrong does not make socialism right.) Having admitted that many Latin Americans
would "find the language of northern Anglo-Saxon political economy too
emotionally and culturally thin, too materialistic in its timbre, too
individualistic in its intonation, too drily pragmatic," (THOL, 1) Novak
posits the existence of the "Catholic Whig tradition" in order to
offer something to Latin Americans which is not entirely alien to their
heritage and yet promotes capitalism.
Curiously, he takes his cue in this matter from Friedrich von Hayek, a
quintessential libertarian and northern European secularist, who defines Whig
as one who favors "a free economy (and democracy and pluralism)."
(THOL, 2) What Novak endeavors to do is
to take the writers whom I quoted in the first part of this talk, tone down what
they said a bit, and enroll Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic thinkers among
them. A few examples of his manner of
proceeding follow.
"The
God who gave us life gave us liberty."
The words are Thomas
Jefferson's, but the thesis is that
of Thomas Aquinas. For
Aquinas, man is the glory of the
universe, an image of God on
earth, made to be like God in his
liberty. (THOL, 115)
What is the problem with this? When St. Thomas wrote about man and his
freedom it was simply a statement of the truth of man's freedom of choice; they
were not meant to be a political statement.
It is otherwise with Jefferson.
Liberty as used here by Jefferson and by Aquinas mean different
things. Novak describes the
18th-century innovators thus,
One
of the great achievements of the Whig traditon was its new
world experiment, the Novus Ordo
Seclorum (the new order of the
ages). Its American progenitors called that experiment the
commercial
republic. The Whigs were the first
philosophers in
history to grasp the importance of
basing government of the
people upon the foundation of
commerce. They underpinned
democracy
with a capitalist, growing economy.
(THOL, 11)
In his attempt to justify Aquinas's standing as a
Whig, Novak has to fudge a good deal.
For example, he makes the point that Thomas accepted the created world
and rejected the supernaturalistic Augustinianism common to many earlier
Catholic thinkers. Thus Aquinas
"legitimated...all that is good about human nature and its strivings" (THOL, 111)
But does this make him a Whig?
And in what sense is it just to say that St. Thomas legitimated the
"strivings" of human nature?
Novak
continues,
By
no means would it be legitimate to ask if Thomas Aquinas were
a
Whig in the same sense as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Lord Acton,
or Friedrich von Hayek.
The more exact question is, What did
Thomas Aquinas hold that
might
embolden those who today cherish the Whig tradition to
count him in their number? There are six propositions of Aquinas
that
seem particularly compelling to the Whig temper. (THOL) 113-114)
What are those "six propositions?" They are:
1. "Civilization is constituted by reasoned
conversation;" 2. "The human
being is free because he can reflect and choose;" 3. "Civilized political institutions
respect reflection and choice;" 4.
"True liberty is ordered liberty;"
5. "Humans are self-determined persons, not mere individuals (group
members);" and 6. "The regime worthiest of the human
person mixes elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy." Most of these six theses are not peculiar to
the Whig tradition, number six, for example, has been a staple of political
philosophers since pagan antiquity, and numbers two, four and five are likewise
hardly peculiar to the Whigs. But in
fact Novak does not really attempt to make a serious argument here. He does not attempt to show that these
theses are uniquely Whig, nor that, to the extent St. Thomas held any of them,
this fact should make us "count him" in the same tradition as John
Locke. By Novak's method of reasoning,
almost every classical political philosopher could be counted as a Whig.
It
would be extremely tedious to examine in detail each of Novak's six points, so
let us look a bit at his discussion of just one of them to see his method of
proceeding.
"Fourth
Thesis: True liberty is ordered
liberty." After some platitudes on
the need for restraint and the moral virtues, Novak says the following,
The
proudest boast of the young Whig republic, the United States,
was the legendary manly strength (virtue)
of its leaders, notably
George Washington, James Madison, and
Thomas Jefferson - and also
the virtue of its people, who were
asked in an unprecedented way
to
reflect and to deliberate upon the ratification of the
Constitution under which they would
live and to maintain
sufficient
virtue to keep the republic from the
self-destruction
into which all earlier republics had
speedily fallen. (THOL,
117)
In the first place, this paragraph has really
nothing to do with the rather vague discussion of virtue which preceeds it, nor
does it have anything to do with St. Thomas.
In typical Novak fashion, no argument is made. Nothing is even asserted.
All depends upon a vague power of association and suggestion.
Moreover,
Novak shifts back and forth, as it suits his purposes, between a narrow and an
expansive definition of Whig. No one of
the six points is especially characteristic of the Whig tradition as defined by
Hayek, for example. Throughout Novak
implies much more about Aquinas than he dare assert, and asserts much more than
he proves.
There
are undoubtedly thinkers whom one can call Catholic Whigs - Lord Acton, for
example, would seem to be one, and Novak himself fits the definition well. The important question, of course, is
whether it includes exponents of authentic Catholic tradition, such as St.
Thomas Aquinas. And I think that if
Novak's case is the best one that can be made for including Aquinas among the
Whigs, then definitely St. Thomas cannot be labeled as such. Certainly Aquinas says things that Whigs
said, and that nearly everybody would say, such as that tyranny or totalitarian
government is an evil or that order is better than chaos. But this does not make him a Whig.
VI. Catholic alternative
We
have looked at various attempts to refashion human society. Some of these attempts at least gave a nod
in the direction of the solidarity of mankind as the necessary foundation of
any social order, while others denied that.
Before finishing, let us turn to what the Catholic Church proposes on
these matters.
Catholic
social thought has always seen society as a unity, a unity based on true mutual
interests, on justice and on charity.
Here is a vision of community, yet a vision that does not fail to take
into account our fallen human nature.
Just as labor and capital are not inherently in conflict, so all the
other natural groupings of human society can and ought to work together so as
to form a community not just of individuals but of nations. As Pope Pius XII said in his first encyclical,
Summi Pontificatus (October 20, 1939), the evils of his own day were
caused in the first place by "forgetfulness of that law of human
solidarity and charity which is dictated and imposed by our common origin and
by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever people they
belong." And Pope Pius goes on to
speak of the "truth which associates men as brothers in one great
family," and further,
And
the nations, despite a difference of development due to
diverse
conditions of life and of culture, are not destined to
break
the unity of the human race, but rather to enrich and
embellish
it by the sharing of their own peculiar gifts and by
that
reciprocal interchange of goods which can be possible and
efficacious only when a mutual love and
a lively sense of charity
unite all the sons of the same Father
and all those redeemed by
the same Divine Blood.
Here is a vision of human community and
solidarity as powerful as anything that the Rainbow Family can come up
with. It is opposed both to the Whig
version of civilization founded on mere exchange of goods and to those who
forget the fact of original sin. The
entire social teaching of the Church is based on this vision of human
solidarity. Nor does the latest social
encyclical, Centesimus Annus, change anything in this regard, despite
some of its tendentious commentators, who have created a widespread belief that
somehow the Church now takes a more benign view of a society based on the free
market than she previously did.
The
most sober Catholic, if he truly has formed his mind on Catholic truth, will
not deny this vision of human community, while the most optimistic Catholic, if
he is orthodox, will realize that our vision of community must be tempered by
the realities of our sinful state. The
social teachings of the Church present this chastened vision of community,
tempered by the reality of personal sin and the creation of structures of sin,
structures which both institutionalize evil and tend to make all of us
cooperators in evil. Because of this, I
suggest that when he considers the foundations of society a Catholic ought to
be at once both hardheaded and a dreamer, both realistic and utopian. If a Catholic is confronted by those who
desire a total reshaping of civilization, a civilization refounded on some new
principle, be it the Novus Ordo Seclorum of the commercial republicans or the
trans-historical paradise of the Marxists, he should reply in these words of
St. Pius X, from his encyclical letter, Notre Charge Apostolique, of
August 25, 1910,
No,
Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in
these times of social and intellectual
anarchy when everyone
takes it upon himself to teach as a
teacher and lawmaker – the
City cannot be built otherwise than
as God has built it; society
cannot be set up unless the Church
lays the foundations and
supervises
the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be
found, nor is the New City to be
built on hazy notions; it has
been
in existence and still is : it is Christian civilization, it
is
the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored
continually
against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers,
rebels and miscreants. (No. 11)
Christian civilization is not something existing
in the air, something that is a blueprint only, something that forever eludes
us. No, it has existed. Its effects and remnants still exist in
parts of the world. It is of course
true that this historic Christian civilization had many faults. And though it is the case that these faults
could, in principle at least, have been dealt with within the framework of
Catholicism, it is also the case that a Catholic will realize that the search
for a perfect civilization is vain. If
the Catholic city had faults, then let these be corrected as well as possible,
but if they are never entirely corrected that does not mean that the social
order should be scrapped and begun over again.
It is rather a matter of setting right, restoring, protecting. The more keenly Catholics of the past had
seen the defects of Christian civilization, the more keenly they should have
tried to correct them, but at the same time understanding that there was no
magic formula which would usher in the new order. It was simply a matter of the hard work of shoring up and
improving what they already had.
On
the other hand, though, a Catholic is a kind of utopian, a dreamer of dreams of
perfection, without contradicting anything that I have just said. For he longs for the perfect
"civilization of love" (to use a phrase of Paul VI and John Paul II),
the social order that is true community.
He longs to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in renewing this earth. Ultimately, though, he is longing for the
heavenly Jerusalem coming down from above, for only here can the true Catholic
city be found. As the epistle to the
Hebrews tell us, here on earth we have no lasting city, but we seek the city
which is to come. And in desiring that
city which is to come, we at the same time work to establish and maintain the
earthly Catholic city, hoping perhaps that in some way the earthly city can be
transformed with the spirit of that city coming down from Heaven. Thus we acknowledge with Pius X our mundane
task of continually restoring what we have, while at the same time longing for
what we do not yet have.
At
the heart of the Church is the sacrifice of the Mass, an act of reconciliation
between God and man, between individual men, between man and the rest of
creation. Thus at the heart of any
civilization formed and informed by the Faith is reconciliation, unity,
community. This is the vision of the
social order that the Church has always held out to mankind. If the participants of the Rainbow Family do
not understand this, do not understand that the Church is their ally, even their
guide, in whatever good that they are seeking, then perhaps the fault lies with
us Catholics. How can we convince
others that the Church is not simply another instituion of bourgeois society,
but the only real alternative to that society?
Well, perhaps we had best start by convincing first ourselves, next our
fellow Catholics, and then the rest of mankind.